These shows are getting pointless

Kate Livingstone

Published:12:01Friday 27 November 2015

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Whenever I look after my grand children, we always watch a bit of telly together, and a couple of weeks ago was no different.

I closed the blinds to hide the miserable weather outside from our sight, sat down on the couch with Jack and Sophie, and tried to find something for us to watch. As I was flicking between channels, I landed on Pointless, and decided to see what Alexander and Richard had in store for us that day.

Kate Livingstone

Bearing in mind I hadn’t seen the programme in quite a while, I had forgotten exactly how it works but I knew the basics. Four teams are given a pretty unusual category, the pairs then have to give the correct answer to one of these clues. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?

Wrong. Before the show has even been filmed, 100 members of the public are asked to give answers to the same clues, and the competitors have to provide an answer to the clue which they think the fewest people will have gotten right, all in the hopes of scoring a pointless answer. But be careful – an incorrect answer will gain you and your team-mate 100 points. At the end of each round, the team with the most points is eliminated.

Although it does seem a wee bit overly complicated to me, I have to hand it to them – it’s original.

My grandson and I were quite happily guessing every answer – celebrating the ones we got right, shaking our heads at the ones we didn’t – and watching an odd mix of pensioners and students spout out the names of so-called celebrities we’d never heard of.

And then we reached the final. Two teams battled it out to see who could get the lowest score, until we were left with only one. To win the game – and however much money is in the jackpot – the finalists have to provide a pointless answer.

To me, this seems like a lot of hassle for a prize that could be as little as £1000 – split between both team members, £500 is a relatively insignificant amount of money. In my day, five hundred quid would have gone a long way, but now you’ll struggle to find a sofa for less.

I think it’s getting a bit ridiculous. We should either hand out prizes that have the potential to have an impact on someone’s life or stop these pointless rewards altogether, and compete for the pride of winning alone.